


You Who Cut Me To The Bone

by JodiMarie2910



Category: Taylor Swift (Musician), august - Taylor Swift (Song), betty - Taylor Swift (Song), cardigan - Taylor Swift (Song)
Genre: Based on a Taylor Swift Song, Character Study, Cheating, F/M, High School, One Shot, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 10:54:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29965299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JodiMarie2910/pseuds/JodiMarie2910
Summary: The events of the high school love triangle in Taylor Swift's album folklore, told from Inez's perspective.With gratuitous references to other folklore songs, of course :)One-Shot Character Study
Relationships: James/Inez, betty/james
Kudos: 1





	You Who Cut Me To The Bone

Oh, isn’t Inez the wicked one?

Where Betty glows, Inez blazes, destroying everything in her path.

And Inez is calculating in her destruction. For two years, she watches Betty weave her web around James’ heart, cutting off her own path to it, until one day, at the end of their sophomore year of high school, she walks into the school gym to find Betty sitting on the gym floor between James’ legs, her high heels nestled between his Converse sneakers. Her bare skin on his dirty Levi’s.

 _Aw, so cute_ , everyone in their homeroom says.

Inez chews pencil erasers till she can’t rid the taste from her mouth.

Till she can’t erase the mistakes on her Math test.

She buys new erasers, the kind not attached to her pencils, and spends class doodling futile ways to steal back James’ heart.

It won’t work out; she knows this.

Inez doesn’t have a sweet face; she’s all bluntness and bold cynicism and _fuck you_. She glitters, but she isn’t gold; she’s ice when it sparkles on a car windshield—dazzling but hard-edged, cold. She isn’t Betty with her girlish braids and sequin smiles, her knit cardigans and dreamy eyes.

Inez isn’t fucking Nancy Drew.

But she is a loyal sidekick. For the first two years of high school, she and Betty and James were joined at the hip. Inez hung onto every word James said because deep down she’s lovesick and pathetic.

She learned how to skateboard for him and how to make origami out of dollar bills, even how to do quadratic equations so she could join Math Honor Society, of which he’ll soon be president.

She’s awful at tutoring, and she hates Math, but she sat in the library after school twice a week for months so she could pretend to help annoying freshmen and secretly watch James draw lines on graph paper, then rip a sheet off and fold paper cranes.

The freshmen girls like him, with his Italian last name and a face nicely suited to glasses.

Everybody likes James.

But Inez most.

Even more than Betty, though that butterfly of a girl will never know.

Their junior year rolls around, and boys’ names roll eagerly off of Inez’s tongue.

She claims to have been with two or three or four guys over the summer.

(It’s a ridiculous ploy for a jealous reaction, and she hasn’t been with _anyone_ , just her pictures of James, her secret love letters, and—Betty would find this gross—her covertly purchased vibrator.)

She bets Betty will wait until her wedding night; her grandfather—the Baptist preacher in their little town—will fawn over her purity like a miner finding a diamond in the rough, whole if not polished. Untouched.

When at Betty’s persistence, Inez wanders into church on Easter and shuffles to a seat in the back, the grandfather in his starched _He is Risen_ tie looks her over like he’s waiting for Inez to rise from the darkness too.

The youth group girls whisper about her in the corner of the church: Inez whom rumor and scandal always follow.

Inez flashes her middle finger at their backs; she might look like sin, but _she’s_ waiting also.

Waiting on James, that is.

(James’ family doesn’t go to the Baptist church; he’s Catholic, and _oh what a scandal_ that will be when Betty’s parents find out they’re together.)

Betty’s parents learn about James on the Tuesday before the week of finals.

(It’s a shame, it being so close to summer.)

Betty doesn’t want to break up—they can date in secret, she says.

(Inez doesn’t believe it; Betty’s never told a convincing lie in her fucking life.)

Betty’s going off to Christian summer camp, and she says they can do long distance. Talking on the phone and all that bullshit.

(James looks like he doesn’t believe in long distance.)

Betty cries, and he gives in.

(Inez rolls her eyes. They’re not joined at the hip anymore, so she’s sitting behind them.)

One night in mid-June, Inez tells her parents she’s meeting friends at the movies, but she doesn’t have any close friends besides James and Betty, so instead she cruises around in her mom’s borrowed minivan, windows rolled down and music blasting, pretending its her own red Mercedes.

She drives past James’ house five times but doesn’t have the courage to knock on the door.

Then, like a figment of her worst intentions, he appears, skateboarding down the block in that lazy yet controlled way he has.

She’s stopping her car and asking him if he wants to take a drive before she can think too hard about the consequences.

They end up at Burger King, where he orders the same menu item as her—a whopper with a large Coke and fries—and she takes that as a sign.

They sit in the corner of the Burger King and talk for two hours, and it feels like it did before Betty came to their town at the beginning of high school.

Inez has known James her whole life—she was here _first_ , damn it—and maybe that’s why it’s easy to silence the little voice of guilt in her head when she kisses James in the Burger King parking lot. It’s hot—not the kiss, the weather—humid and sweltering, actually. And besides her hair and everything else being a sweaty mess, her mouth probably tastes like French fries, but for some reason, James kisses her back.

And yeah, that is kinda hot, come to think of it.

His lips come away stained with her black lipstick.

So the summer progresses, in cramped car backseats and pitch black, empty theater matinees.

Inez becomes the sinner pristine Betty never would and never will be.

She cancels all her summer plans along with her virginity.

But it’s not like Inez imagined; there are no beach trips. James doesn’t teach her skateboard tricks. He doesn’t eat ice cream with her in the unimpressive collection of stores that passes for a mall in their town.

James isn’t _hers_.

That fact slaps Inez in the face when Betty returns one sinister Sunday afternoon, high off mountain air and the holy spirit, her cheeks as rosy as Inez’s drunk uncle.

Fresh-faced, new.

At Betty’s insistence, the three of them take an awkward drive together, with Inez in the backseat of James’ car where she’s been all summer.

They eat grilled hot dogs with mustard and onions at Betty’s lakeside house.

The mustard stings the cold sore in Inez’s mouth. The one she got from James.

She says she feels sick and goes home after an hour.

That night she lays awake with her stomach in knots; at two in the morning, she throws up her hot dog, her throat raw with the acid of her guilt.

Guilt replaced by anger when the sun rises. When she realizes James hasn’t responded to her text asking if they can talk. He probably doesn’t care that she _is_ physically ill and that _wasn’t_ an excuse to leave Betty’s house early.

Well, it wasn’t _solely_ that.

James finally responds around six in the morning.

 _It was just a summer thing_ , he says. Inez is an expired thrill.

She wants to say, _I_ _f that’s the case, we’re still in August._

They return to school the next week, and James is chasing Betty down the hall, like always. James doesn’t look at Inez when she sits across the classroom from them, though Betty gestures for her to join them, like always.

(Inez tells Betty later, in passing, that she can’t see the whiteboard from where they’re sitting.)

Liar, liar, the two of them. Inez and James.

Betty doesn’t deserve such friends.

But isn’t James worse, just a little bit?

Inez thinks he is. Or maybe she needs him to be so she doesn’t hate herself so much.

In her bitterness, Inez offers the truth for him, though it burns her bridge with Betty too.

The rumor reaches Betty’s ears by the end of the following school day.

Their homeroom is all atwitter with news of James and Betty once again.

Only this time, they notice Inez too. She’s visible in the worst way possible, but she acts like she doesn’t care.

_Chasing two girls at once, what an asshole._

_Sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend, what a slut._

James and Betty are over, officially, but it doesn’t matter.

James still doesn’t look Inez’s way, doesn’t call her anymore.

She’s burned her bridge with him too.

Inez is a blaze of summer heat, but he longs for the cozy tones of autumn. She can see it in his eyes.

Inez is a blaze of summer heat, extinguished, along with her longing for revenge.

But Betty and James don’t want her apologies.

Nor does James offer her any apology of his own.

There’s only one option left to her, so she deletes their numbers from her phone.

She clears out all their pictures together, save for one.

The most damning one.

The three of them together by the lake the previous summer: her, Betty, and James.

Betty is looking at the camera, James is looking at Betty, and Inez is holding the camera.

And that’s when it hits Inez that she’s been consumed by James without knowing it. Always framing her life within the context of his, never becoming her own person.

She hasn’t made her own friends or made time for her own interests. She’s taking Calculus instead of Statistics. Neither subject interests her, but if she’d thought hard enough about it, she’d probably have chosen Statistics instead. That one trivial fact really ticks her off.

It’s not all bad, though. Thanks to Jim, Inez knows how to skateboard and how to make origami (this is the ‘interesting fact’ she uses when asked for an ‘interesting fact’ about herself).

Inez now knows a fair bit about sex even if not all of it is good.

And Inez aces the Math portion of the SAT.

But she decides if she goes to college, she’ll avoid guys with Italian last names.

(Such names make the familiar seem exotic. Inez now finds them overrated.)

She decides she’ll only fall in love with someone who’s in love with her.

Where Betty gently glows, Inez blazes.

And out from under James’ shadow, she will burn all the brighter.

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this for a writing exercise I gave myself and decided to post it. folklore and evermore were both such gorgeous albums :)


End file.
